You've got the freedom, baby. Walk out if they drag you down

I'm not inclined to aggression. It took me years to even achieve assertiveness. Illustratively, when I was little, my dad, sister, and I used to go to Wendy's pretty often. My kid's meal, devastatingly, would occasionally fail to contain the barbecue sauce I asked for, or the toy I'd hoped to get, and my dad would always encourage me to return to the counter ask the nice lady or gentleman behind the register for whatever I was missing. I'd react by pretty much always either denying that I wanted the item all that much or conniving my dad or Cathi into going up and asking for me. I probably wouldn't even remember these moments as indicative of my spinelessness if my dad didn't compensatorily go out of his way to praise me on the rare occasion when I bravely spoke up for my rights to the brunette mini-Barbie toy.

I feel relatively confident that I've achieved a respectable level of assertiveness by now, having dodged the bullet of being a cowling namby-pamby forever. But upon reflection, I think there's a more dangerous pitfall than timidity that people like me need to avoid: aggression's vindictive, backstabbing, wimpy-ass little brother, Passive Aggressiveness.

The problem is, when people like me fail to resist their natural impulse to avoid Conflict (or anything that resembles Conflict, or any unsuspecting situation that walks past Conflict's house), it's easy to become chronically hesitant to take action in any unfavorable situation. Instead, they condition themselves to seethe on the sidelines, becoming all the more resentful when the situation doesn't rectify itself and no one else swoops in to help, spiraling them into a Passive Aggressive Pout-Land.

I'm not really sure what fortuitously prompted my assertiveness and circumvented my personal descent into PAPL, but somewhere in my developmental process I was encouraged to acknowledge that passivity is a choice--that if I'm capable of taking action but don't, then I have only myself to thank if I don't like the outcome. If I want to be a wimpy do-nothing, I give up my right to be upset with others when my inaction breeds a sucky situation. It's unfair to pass blame onto friends and family members who really don't have a responsibility to making sure you're happy all the time.

In other words: do something, or suck it up.

Not that there aren't exceptions. Lots of exceptions. I think if was truly, 100% convinced of that pithy little slogan, I'd be almost contractually obliged to become either a motivational speaker or football coach.